Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Don't turn a miracle into a tragedy

At long last the big guns of the Israeli press are weighing in on the issue of the planned return of the 'Iraqi-Jewish archive' to Iraq. The archive's recovery was a miracle, but for it it to be sent back would be an act of cultural aggression, argues well-known columnist Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post.

If you happen to be in Washington, DC, between now and January, you can see a
piece of Jewish history that was never supposed to see the light of day. The
National Archives is now exhibiting restored holy books and communal documents
that belonged to the Jewish community of Iraq.

In 1940, the Iraqi Jewish
community numbered 137,000 people. Jews made up more than a quarter of the
population of Baghdad. A 2,500-year-old community, Iraq had for centuries been a
major center of Jewish learning. The Babylonian Talmud was written
there.

The yeshivot in Karbala and Baghdad were considered among the
greatest in the world.

According to Dhiaa Kasim Kashi, a Shi’ite Muslim
interviewed in the 2008 book Iraq’s Last Jews, by the 1930s, the Jews of Iraq
had become leaders in every field. “All of Iraq’s famous musicians and composers
were Jewish,” he said.

“Jews,” he continued, “were so central to
commercial life in Iraq that business across the country used to shut down on
Saturdays because it was the Jewish Shabbat. They were the most prominent
members of every elite profession – bankers, doctors, lawyers, professors,
engineers, etc.”

All of this began to end with the rise of the Nazis in
the 1930s. Due to rampant Islamic Jew hatred, Arab leaders were drawn to the
Nazis. For their part, the Nazis were quick to capitalize on their popularity.
The German ambassador to Iraq, Fritz Grobba, cultivated Nazi sympathizers in the
Iraqi military and organized a pro-Nazi military coup in April 1941.

On
June 1, 1941, as Jews celebrated the festival of Shavuot, the pro-Nazi
government carried out a massive pogrom. Estimates place the number of Jews
murdered at anywhere between 180 and 900. Nine hundred Jewish homes were
destroyed. Hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses were looted and
burned.

The pogrom, which came to be known as the Farhud, or “violent
dispossession,” marked the beginning of the end of the Iraqi Jewish
community.

Iraq was one of the five Arab states that invaded Israel on
May 15, 1948.

The immediate victims of Iraq’s unyielding rejection of
Jewish national liberation were the Jews of Iraq. In 1950, the exodus began. By
the end of 1952, when the government shut the remaining Jews in, 124,000 Jews
had fled Iraq, mainly to Israel. Forced to abandon their private and communal
property, their possessions became hostage to the regime.

The few
thousand Jews left in Iraq lived in utter terror. But even in their reduced
state, they tried to protect the property of their phantom community.

In
Baghdad, only one synagogue remained in operation. The Jews brought all the
communal documents and holy books there for storage.

But as Harold Rhode,
a recently retired US Defense Department cultural expert, reported in August at
PJM Media, in 1985 Saddam Hussein sent his henchmen to the synagogue with
several trucks. They stole the documentary history of the community in broad
daylight.

Rhode explained that Saddam ordered the theft of the Jewish
community’s property both to humiliate the Jews and Israel and to impress his
fellow Arabs. As he put it, from a local cultural perspective, “Humiliation –
i.e., shaming another’s personal reputation – is more important and more
powerful than physical cruelty.

“By capturing the Jewish archives, Saddam
was humiliating the Jewish people. He was showing how powerless the Jews were to
stop him.”

From a pan-Arab perspective, Saddam demonstrated that he “was
in the vanguard of protecting and regaining Arab honor, and was therefore more
worthy of Arab/Muslim leadership than were the others.”

Rhode was
deployed to Iraq shortly after the US-led overthrow of Saddam’s regime. By the
time he arrived in May 2003, there were only a dozen Jews still living in
Iraq.

Rhode was the first American official informed of the existence of
the archive. It was stored in the cellar of the headquarters of Saddam’s
mukhabarat, or secret police. When Rhode arrived at the building with a small
detail of soldiers and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the building had
just been flooded by an unexploded shell that had punctured the water
main.

When he realized the dimensions of the archive, now largely
underwater, Rhode moved heaven and earth to save it. Due to Rhode’s action, and
the support he received from Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, vice president Dick
Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the archive – which included
everything from school records to 500- year-old copies of the Bible – was saved
on Shavuot 2003 and sent to the US.

Once the archive was safely in the
US, the State Department spent $3 million restoring the 2,700 books and tens of
thousands of documents. In the meantime, back in Iraq, there are still hundreds
of Torah scrolls languishing in a government cellar, inaccessible to the public,
and in a horrible state of disrepair.

The fact that the archive was
rescued from Saddam’s vault and is now being shown to the public is a
miracle.

But if nothing changes, on Shavuot 2014, the miracle will come
to a tragic and scandalous end. In an act of cultural aggression, the US
government has promised to return the Jewish communal archive – stolen from the
Iraqi Jewish community by the Iraqi government – to the Iraqi government by June
2014.

The State Department insists that the archive is Iraqi government
property, since it was found in an Iraqi government building. But if that is
true, then all the Jewish property stored in the Gestapo’s dungeons should have
remained German government property after World War II. And even the comparison
to the Nazis is too facile.

Jews could safely enter Germany, and even
live there after the Nazis were defeated. Jews cannot safely enter, let alone
live in, Iraq.

The difference between Jewish property stolen by the Nazis
and Jewish property stolen by Arab regimes is political. It is politically
acceptable to acknowledge that the Nazis were criminals. But the Arabs have
never had to pay a price for their persecution and eventual destruction of their
Jewish communities. No one wishes to recognize the fact that it is anti-Semitism
that drives the Islamic quest to destroy the Jewish state.Read article in full

it is like giving Jewish property stolen by the German occupation forces to governments that collaborated with the Nazis. It is an outrage as I have written here before.

However, it already has happened to French Jews in a certain sense. Families with art treasures that the Germans wanted were murdered by the Germans. But some of these families, like the De Camondo and Reinach families, donated valuable paintings to the French state before WW2. They also donated to the Louvre and other cultural institutions. Then when the Nazis came, the French state of the time allowed and helped the Germans to take them and send them to Auschwitz. [of course the Germans stole their artwork too].

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)